Sensual Journey
by zvi
Summary: Blair returns from a trip after TSbyBS, and then Jim and Blair take a trip to new stage in their relationship
1. Piquant

Piquant 

The recipe referred to in the story can be found at http://home.att.net/~ashburysaubergines/s/r977.htm.

* * *

"Hey, Jim! I'm home!" This is not a casual event. Blair has been gone for a month, roaming territory he'd discovered as a child with Naomi, investigating opportunities for a fraudulent former doctoral candidate, thinking about stepping inside that thin blue line. He is a little afraid of what he will find as he enters. Hopes to discover Jim anxiously awaiting his answer about the academy. But he expects to be warmly welcomed, he expects to have been missed. 

He does not expect to find a warm crockpot on the stove, a lonely little note above it informing him: 

Chief,  
Rafe got injured and sent to the hospital, and there wasn't anybody else to buddy up with H on a stakeout tonight. I'm sorry. See you in the morning. 

Jim 

P.S. It's a curry soup. Eat as much as you want. 

It's just as well, he thinks. He learned something last night that changes everything maybe. This way, he can finish his meal without Jim waiting on his every word, watching him eat. Lifts up the lid of the trash thinking he'll see a container telling him where the soup came from, but the bag is empty and new. 

He throws his junk in his room, grabs a towel, and goes to take a shower. When he gets back to his room, he notices that it is as well-ordered as it was after his second trip to Peru, when Jim put all of his things away while he recovered from pneumonia. He starts to smile, but the memory is too sad for that, really. Gets a pair of jeans from his dresser and notes with some surprise that Jim has let a layer of dust settle on the wood. Decides the loft is warm enough to go without a shirt, and braids his hair in two thick cornrows instead of brushing it. He'll pay for that, but it's better than letting his hair air dry. He's got a radically shorter 'do now, but that doesn't change his head's basic curly nature. 

He walks into the kitchen and rereads the note. Opens the fridge, hoping to see a carton telling him the soup is Vietnamese, he's dying for Vietnamese, but finds nothing of the sort. Blair decides he's not hungry. He clumps into the living room and thinks about watching TV. Realizes he has no idea what's on, but also knows that Jim has pre-programmed the preview channel into the remote. Despite an increased channel selection from the last time he saw a TV (what might Oxygen be? or or Starz! ?), nothing sounds appealing. 

He wanders back in the kitchen. Reads the note. Grabs a slice of bread. Nearly gags when he realizes he's eating white bread. Makes a mental note to lecture Jim on the similarities between white flour, processed sugar, and cocaine. Starts to put the bread in the compost bucket when he sees an eggplant skin in there. Looks more closely, and can make out garlic paper and the stem of what could be a zucchini. Blair has a recipe for a summer curry soup that calls for eggplant and zuchinni and garlic. 

He heads to his room, starts to unpack. Realizes that it's not so much a question of unpacking his clothes, but throwing them out. Only the jeans are wearable, although it's generous to call them jeans. In their thin, well-holed condition, lingerie is equally appropriate. Grins as he thinks about walking around campus when the new crop of freshman get in. He's gotten used to thinking about Rainier, it's no longer a mental sore tooth. But he loses his grin when he thinks about wearing them near Jim, and some of the things he's learned about sentinels and guides and senses and insanity. 

Goes back in the kitchen, finally tastes the soup. It is his summer soup recipe, which he loves and almost never makes. It is very good, yet too hot and spicy for a sentinel, but Jim made it, and he hates it. 

* * *

Jim staggers into the apartment around 3 AM. He'd caught Blair's scent in the stairwell, so Blair was back. Which was good, because he had missed Blair. 

He drops his keys in the basket, kicks his boots off. Bends over and lines them up neatly by the door. Bangs his head with the doorknob. 

Jim is not thinking clearly. He walks into the kitchen and sees the crockpot. His nose is full of Blair, his mouth is daydreaming about blairpudding, blairsicles, blairberry jam. Only his eyes are paying attention to the soup, and all they see are chopped up vegetables in a pale, reddish base. He thinks it's very kind of Blair to have made him a tomato soup. He picks up a spoon. 

Blair screams his name. 

Jim drops the spoon. 

"Curry, man, curry. Hot, spicy. Sentinel-murdering stuff. How the hell'd you make this?" Blair approaches and pulls him away from the offending potage. 

Jim frowns. He's hungry and the soup is warm. "Taste at 1, smell at 2, wear gloves. And I got Mrs. Pasteur across the way to chop the onions. Raw onions are killer." He walks over to the refrigerator. There should be cold pizza. 

Pizza, good pizza, is good cold. 

He gets out the pizza. It is very good pizza. It will be better warm. He gets out a small metal tray, slides it in the toaster oven. Takes a bite of the pizza. Realizes his mistake. Re-opens the toaster oven, puts the pizza on the tray, slides it in, and turns it to toast. Turns around and looks at Blair, who is fairly cute and fuzzy looking. 

Jim thinks that the kid looks pretty good with less hair, although he's not wild about the braids. Is really glad Blair wrote to say that the hair had been chopped off, because the kid doesn't really look like a kid anymore. Blair's lost enough weight that his natural stockiness doesn't look like babyfat, and the short curls let his eyes pop out of his face. He's tan, too, darker than the pale gold of his winter skin. He looks like a grown up, now, instead of a college student. Even if his mouth is opening and closing in a bizarre approximation of a goldfish as he approaches Jim. 

When Blair's just a foot away, Jim reaches out and lays his hand on a sturdy shoulder, squeezes. "I missed you, fishface." Pulls his friend in for a tight hug. Is startled as hell when Blair kisses him, full on the lips, slips him some tongue. 

The kiss is too dry, awkward in its unexpectedness, its surprise. It tasted good, though. "Chief?" 

"I'm sorry, Jim. You weren't here, but you made curry. It took me a while to figure out why that was so wrong, and it scared me when I did." Blair reaches up to run his hands through his hair, and encounters the cornrows. "Damn it!" 

The toaster oven dings. Jim is off again, his attention caught by hot cheese and the really good tomato sauce he can smell. The combination of fresh and dry herbs in the sauce is something spectacular, and Blair is being weirder than usual. It happens sometimes in the middle of the night, and usually, if Jim can leave him alone, his roommate reverts to normal. 

"Some of the people I went to visit knew about sentinels, Jim. I met three guides, one sentinel, and one pre-adolescent potential sentinel." There's a harsh burst of laughter, but it's more rueful than derisive. "One of Naomi's fuckbuddies is a guide, Jim. This guy was like an uncle to me when I was growing up. There's a community of sentinels and guides, and Mark warned them all away while I was trying to do research. Now that I've been thoroughly discredited by discovering a genuine sentinel, they figured it was safe to talk to me, let me in on all of the insider information." 

Jim's eyes widen at this and he walks back over to Blair and nudges with his hip. It's pretty stupid as gestures of support go, but his mouth is full and both of his hands are greasy and sauce-stained. 

Blair smiles, but he's not showing any teeth. "Like how to manage our sex life." 

Jim frowns. He frowns a lot, because sexuality is one of those things he can't not know about as a sentinel. He knows that Henry swings both ways, and that Rafe might if women didn't frighten him so much he stuck exclusively to H. He knows that Simon is the straightest man on the planet, although his tastes are even more catholic than Blair's. And he knows that Blair likes women ninety percent of the time, and he's pretty damn sure that the other ten percent Blair still hasn't worked up the courage to act on. He shrugs his shoulders, indicating that Blair should continue. 

"Apparently, I should be, uh, penetrating you. Orally and anally. Bareback." 

This is not an idea that Jim is opposed to in the abstract, but in this particular instant, Blair's voice is small and wet and broken-sounding. He doesn't like that at all. He swallows hastily. "Blair, you're an anthropologist. I know you're all for exploring different cultures, but if you don't want to be part of their little group, we won't. It's not like we haven't done all right by ourselves." 

"Yeah, I know you're right. I knew it when they told me that I'd been, uh, neglecting you that way." Blair sighs, that little sigh of disappointment he used to get when one of his brighter students made an elementary error. "There was just this little moment of terror...." Suddenly Blair is staring hard into Jim, staring him down. He has to look away. "They told me that sentinels go crazy without constant exposure to their guide." 

And Jim can't help it, he bursts out laughing. Spews microscopic chunks of green pepper across the floor. 

He can smell Blair get angry, the kind of anger that covers fear. "What the fuck is so funny, man? I came home to a pot of fucking. Curry. Soup. Yesterday, Mark tells me that when he said quote-unquote constant exposure he meant a goddamn rolling orgy. And you blunder into the loft in the middle of the night like you don't even know I'm here. I'm not laughing, Jim." 

"Chief, Blair, bubeleh," which is wrong of him, he knows Blair can't stand when he uses Yiddish expressions, but the kid is so goddamned funny sometimes. "I hallucinate from a single dose of cough medicine. Breathing in a little Golden made me blind for a week. Sniffing opium paste on prayer beads knocked me off my fucking feet. I don't need a lot of anything for it to affect me." He stops, takes a bite, waits for Blair to get it. 

Blair stares at him blankly, like he's out of his fucking mind. "And?" 

"I'm living in a little blairdust cloud, Chief. You're all over the loft, all over my truck, in my clothes. You've shed 12 hairs that I've noticed during the course of this conversation, your scent hasn't disappeared from this loft in all the time you've been gone, and you kept sending me post cards that smelled like your socks." He took another bite of his pizza. This stuff was good. 

Blair smacks himself in the forehead, kind of hard. Does it again. "I don't know why I fucking cared." The grin this time is toothy and wide. 

Jim smirks at him, gets another slice. It's been a good day. The stakeout ended in an arrest and Blair got home. And the pizza tastes better the second day. 


	2. Cutaneous Deprivation

Cutaneous Deprivation 

Blair looked at Jim's hand. 

Four fingers and a thumb, loosely curled, hanging in the air about an inch from where his ear had been. Jim had, once again, backed off from touching Blair for no apparent reason. 

Blair looked at Jim. His friend was quite still. The big man was partially tangled in the seat belt, and the door of the truck was propped open with one foot, but Jim had turned back when Blair had said— 

—What had he said? A pun involving marshmallow and meditation. Not funny, but groanworthy. A noogieable offense. 

Jim's hand drifted backwards, and Blair looked out into the parking lot, scanning the cars. He recognized all of them, familiar shapes and license plates on the 800 block of Prospect. Looked at Jim's hand, which dangled loosely, stupidly above a set of rock solid thighs. "I don't have cooties," he said in the hand's general direction, then slipped quickly out of the car, up the stairs, into the loft. 

Jim closed the front door softly just as Blair opened the door to his room. "Don't you think I would know if you had lice?" 

Blair shrugged, resolutely kept his eyes on the rumpled sheets and scattered pillows of his bed. "Hmm, well then, maybe it's just the plague." He'd tried to have this conversation with Jim before, find out what he'd done to piss off his partner, but Jim always blew him off. 

"Do you always have to be so damn inscrutable?" 

"Jim, man, you better watch out. Those fifty-cent words like inscrutable are pretty damn addictive." He walked in his room, started making his bed. Busy work, so he could avoid looking in Jim's direction. 

He could hear Jim sigh, walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, clink some bottles. "You know I'm bad at this, Sandburg." Jim's tone was light, conversational. It could easily have been saying, "It's gonna rain today, Chief." 

"Bad at what, Jim?" He stopped futzing (really the only way to describe continuing to make your bed past the point where all of the sheets and pillows were on more or less straight and more or less smooth) and flopped down on top, destroying all his hard work. 

"Making you tell me why we were joking around one second and you got pissy the next second." 

Blair whipped onto his side, snapped his mouth open and then closed it again, reconsidered his indignation. "You got weird before I got pissy." Blair got up and walked into the kitchen. "Hand me a beer." He took the proffered bottle, opened it, sipped. 

Jim frowned at him, worked the jaw a little. Blair still didn't know if Jim deliberately worked his jaw to be intimidating, or if it was one of his repressed friend's few methods of honest emotional expression. Whichever, it was irritating as hell. "Sandburg, I am not weird." 

_You oversensitive nutjob_, thought Blair. _I'm not calling you a freak. How can I get through to you that _different_ is not necessarily **bad**?_ "You are not weird. But you've been acting weird since…." Blair took a sip of beer, trying to think when the weirdness, the new and different weirdness, had begun. "Since I enrolled at the Academy. Are you doing some weird excessive guilt thing, man? You think I'm going to be miserable as a cop or something?" 

"No." 

Which Blair accepted at face value, for once. There had been none of the usual signs of Jim guilt: endless cups of tea and plates of unasked for food, ostentatious ignoring of loud music or burned incense, groceries appearing in the fridge instead of harangues about missed shopping trips. No, Jim had been as bitchy as before Blair had finished writing the first chapter of the diss, when things were still reasonably good between them, so guilt probably wasn't the moving force behind the weirdness. But, despite his finely honed powers of observation, this little anthropologist-cum-cop had no idea what was the source of the strange behavior, and a simple 'no' did not provide any clues. How any human being reached the age of forty without learning how to carry on a simple conversation was beyond Blair, but his partner possessed that, uh, gift. He'd have to tease an answer out of him, but there's no good way to tell a big macho guy like Jim that, "You don't touch me anymore, damn it! You're weirding me out." 

Unless one blurted it out as Blair had just done. 

Jim raised a single, elegant eyebrow. Blair focused on it, refusing to look at the rest of Jim's face. Jim shrugged, turned back to the fridge, and started hauling out produce. "I didn't want to weird you out." 

"You radically changed your behavior for no apparent reason in order to make me think nothing was wrong? You and Simon talk about the Sandburg Zone, but I swear to god I lived a normal life with people who made sense before I met you." He snorted and took another sip. "What's for dinner?" 

"Chicken stir fry." 

Blair turned around to get out a cutting board and knives. "So, Jim?" 

"Bok choi and carrots?" 

"You have new food allergies?" Then he turned around to see Jim handing him the veggies in question. He took them, went to the sink to wash them. "Why'd you stop with the noogies and such?" 

"Noogies and such?" Jim snorted. 

Blair washed his hands and attacked the bok choi with a vegetable brush. "You know, Jim. You touch me all the time. Correction. You used to touch me all the time. Now, you reach towards me and stop." 

"Oh." 

Blair rolled his eyes. "Is this a cop thing? Do I lose manly man points if my partner touches me? Rafe and Henry touch each other, granted, not as much as you touch — _touched_ — me, but still…." 

"No, it's not a cop thing. It's a sentinel thing." 

"Damn it, Jim, I know I'm not doing a thesis anymore, but we still need to keep track of things with your senses." He slammed the green and white leaves into a colander and smacked on the water. "The diss is through, but we're still partners on the senses, and how the fuck am I supposed to—" 

"Not a senses thing. A sentinel thing. Or rather, I didn't want you to think it was a sentinel thing." Quiet voice. Not a 'placating the madman' voice, not a 'painful revelation about my past' voice. Just quiet, calm, like Jim had given it a lot of thought. 

Blair usually suffers when Jim tries to resolve sentinel things without guidance. 

He tugged at his hair, not at the nape but the crown. _People_ *can _die_ when Jim tries to handle this on his own.* And his mind flashed on a bloody handprint on his shirtsleeve and the fountain in front of Hargrove Hall. 

After a few minutes of silent washing and chopping, Jim put in a jazz CD they both could listen to. 

Dinner conversation was non-existent, and they didn't say much when they cleaned up either. Without discussion, they both sat on the couch. Jim reached for the remote, but Blair snatched it up, put it out of Jim's reach. "So, what's the thing?" 

"The thing?" The confusion in Jim's voice was completely false, Blair could tell. Not an ounce of genuine misunderstanding lay between them. 

"The sentinel thing that you don't want me to know about." 

Jim blinked, shrugged, frowned. "You don't want to have sex with me." 

Blair blinked. Blinked again. Blinked a third time and scrubbed at his ears for good measure. "Come again?" 

"You had hysterics thinking about having sex with me." 

Blair considered briefly that Jim was delusional. Thought about it a minute more and wondered if his pheromones or musk (or whatever the hell it was Jim tuned into to identify attraction) had been going over time around his sentinel. Which, even if it were true, wouldn't explain the hysterics comment. "Jim, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." 

Jim sighed. "The night you came home." 

"From my walkabout?" 

"Yeah. I came in, you screamed at me about soup, you said we had to have sex, I laughed at you and ate pizza." 

"Jim, you're a throwback to a primitive form of man; you know that, right?" 

Jim pointed at him and growled. "That, that right there! That is why I hate talking to you. What the hell is that supposed to mean? What does it have to do with anything?" 

"It means you are a self-centered _Neanderthal_, man!" Blair took a deep breath. He could be calm about this. He would be calm about this. He would not raise his voice again. "I was panicked because Uncle Marty basically told me to expect you to have either had your senses go back to normal or have gone into a major zone since I left you alone for two months." He could hear his voice rising, hear himself losing control again, and seemed powerless to stop. "I wasn't upset because I thought I might have to fuck your ass. I thought I might have fucked you over! You motherfucking _dumbass_!" 

During the course of his tirade, Jim had inched backward on the couch. He stopped at the word 'dumbass' and began to look … pleased. He smiled, he grinned, he _beamed_. 

Blair was forced to smack him upside the head. 

"Ow, dammit!" Jim rubbed his head and scowled. "You know I leave the touch dial turned high at home. And you hit me hard enough to fuck with my sense of balance, too." 

"Sorry," muttered Blair. Then he took another deep breath. "Actually, that was wrong. I am sorry. And, if I take up abusing you whenever you're amused at my expense, you'll be one walking bruise." 

"You were repeating yourself." 

"And I'll do it again. Jim, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." 

"I looked pleased because you were repeating yourself. I think you said 'fuck' four times. I thought it was …." He sighed and rubbed his head. 

"What?" 

"You'll hit me again." 

"You thought it was cute, didn't you?" 

Jim inclined his head and raised it. 

They sat in silence for a few moments. Blair contemplated the remote in his hand, thought about turning on the TV and letting them both off the hook. 

Jim cleared his throat. "Would it have been so horrible? If I had normal senses, I mean?" 

"No, of course not! I just — I don't know. I was panicking. I guess it seemed like the end of the world at the time." 

"You know that the official partner deal would have still been open, right? It's not, not about the senses, Sandburg. I haven't needed you for that since …." Jim shrugged. 

Blair blinked. He'd known, he'd been keeping records in fact, of the times when Jim had needed him, and it just wasn't that often anymore. It was true that Jim used him as an anchor so as not to get lost when looking for evidence with the senses, but it was also true that Jim could use Simon or Megan just as easily, and with a lot fewer questions to answer. Jim hadn't zoned in ages, they seemed to have mapped out all of his allergies about a year ago, and Jim knew both what household products were sentinel-safe and where to get them. "So what do you need me for, Jim?" 

Jim's mouth twitched and his eyes gleamed with humor for an instant, but then he cocked his head to the side in his 'listening' posture. He didn't say anything, just looked at Blair and seemed to listen for a good long while. Then he smiled, for real, and said, "You'll hate it." 

Blair thought about that for a little bit. Jim was usually right when he said something like that, but this time Blair needed to know. He needed to know that there was a need in operation here, or at least a want. Needed to know if his home had been bought with his lies in front of a camera, or if, even after Alex and Zoeller and all of the other shit they'd been through, it was still about friendship. "Not if it's true." 

"First of all, you have to know that I meant what I said in the hospital." He sighed. "You're the best cop that I've ever known, and if I couldn't have you as a partner, I'd go back to working alone." Then Jim picked up Blair's hand. 

Blair could feel something shift inside of him, a mild thud, as if a missing puzzle piece had been snapped into a picture. Oddly, he could tell it wasn't the _last_ puzzle piece, but it was close enough to the end that if you squinted, you could make out the image. He didn't squint. 

He didn't dare squint while Jim was running his thumb up and down along his fingers, stopping on each digit to caress the cuticle and the knuckles. He gasped, and Jim stopped rubbing, but didn't let go. 

"You're … like Jim Byrnes on that Highlander show you make me watch." 

"Huh?" _We are down with the eloquence tonight, my friend_, thought Blair. 

"What I do — what I _am_ — is invisible. You see it. You look at it, you write it down. You make my senses, you make _me_ real. I need you, so that I can be me." 

Blair felt his back release, his shoulders lower, and his arms relax all at once. He smiled and squeezed with the hand Jim was still holding. "If I told you, 'I love you,' would I lose all my manly man points for the evening?" 

Jim snickered. "Uh, Sandburg, you're already deep into negative territory on the manly man points." He reached out and ruffled Blair's hair, then spoke in an artificial baritone rumble with a bizarre whiny edge on it. "'Why do you need me, Jim?'" 

Blair used his free hand to poke Jim in the stomach. "Asshole." 

Jim giggled. "I know." 

"I love you, anyway," Blair said in a tone rich with dire threat and imprecation. 

"I know." Another giggle. 

Blair waited a beat. Another. "And?" 

"I've grown accustomed to your face." A tidal wave of insane chortles from Tall, Dark, and Extra Touchy-Feely. 

Blair just looked at him with one raised eyebrow as the laughter ebbed and flowed for about a minute. "And?" 

Jim rolled his eyes, put Blair in a headlock and noogied viciously. 

Upon his release, Blair stood, ran his fingers through his hair, and then patted Jim on the head. "Close enough, Captain Caveman." 

**Epilogue**

It took Blair about fifteen minutes, but he came rushing into the living room, shouting, "You lose! You lose!" 

Jim, who had stopped trying to find anything watchable on television and begun reading, dropped his magazine. "What are you talking about, Sandburg?" 

"You lose all the manly man points in the world for quoting show tunes." 

Jim rolled his eyes. "Okay, Miss Doolittle, I bow to your great masculine prowess." 

Blair gave him the finger. "Go fornicate with a pig, Professor Higgins!" He turned to go, then turned back. "Are you picturing me as a London matchgirl that you're grooming into a suitable fiancé?" 

Jim smiled. "I picture you as a slightly nave grad student who I taught to be a cop and who taught me to be a little more human. Sometimes, Chief, you think too much." 


End file.
